Thursday, June 18, 2015

On July 1-2, 2015, the East Asia Library of Stanford University Libraries will host an international academic conference titled Beyond the Book: A Conference on Unique and Rare Primary Sources for East Asian Studies Collected in North America. The conference will bring librarians, archivists, and scholars from all over North America to present research papers on less-known materials, mostly in non-book formats. It is our hope that the conference will draw scholarly attention to those scattered, yet valuable, resources for East Asian Studies.

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

The Boston Globe featured the LOCKSS program in a recent article: “What was once a race to rescue information from going-extinct media (think of old files trapped on floppy disks) has morphed into a mounting need to copy and curate massive troves of data, says Dr. David Rosenthal, the founder of a library-led digital preservation network run out of the Stanford University Libraries.

Digital information decays over time and files grow corrupt from ‘bit rot,’ which Rosenthal says is best fended off by creating copies of data in multiple virtual and physical locations.”

In “The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever: Changes in digital distribution, rights management increasingly make preservation tough” (ars technica, June 2, 2015), Henry Lowood, curator for the History of Science & Technology Collections and Film & Media Collections in the Stanford University Libraries, said: "If you want to know how the game was played in 2014, you will need documentation about how the game was played in 2014. Having the game available to you in 2064 so that you can play it yourself won't tell you anything about that. It just tells you how you, 50 years later in a completely different environment, will play that game.